Gervase Markham

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Google Calendar, and Meetings in UTC: The ‘Rekjavik Trick’

Google Calendar is great; I’m a big fan. A little while back, it acquired timezone support for events. More recently, it acquired split timezone support (start and end in different timezones), which is awesome for flights. And there’s a drop-down list of all the countries in the world with all of their applicable timezones. Surely that must be comprehensive, right?

Well, yes and no. I attend one meeting which is scheduled in UTC. There seems to be no entry in the massive timezone list for this. If you say you are in London (GMT+00:00), then your event will obey the UK DST rules, which means it won’t actually be in UTC during the summer.

However, there is a workaround. There is one country in the world which uses UTC and no DST – Iceland. So, if you want to have a meeting whose time is set year-round in UTC, then tell Google Calendar you are holding it in Rekjavik.

(It would be nice if Google would add an explicity “UTC” option to their massive timezones list, but this will do for now.)